That might be the battlecry of Joe Putrock, Albany photographer and drummer for the band with the best name in Nippertown – the Charlie Watts Riots.

The cell phone – or perhaps more accurately the cell phone camera – drove Polaroid out of the instant-film business last year, but apparently the instant-photography business isn’t quite dead yet, and Putrock seems determined to breath new life into it as a means of artistic expression.

So what do you after you close the doors on the art gallery that you’ve poured your heart and soul into for three years?

You make your own art, that’s what.

At least that’s what you do if you’re Elizabeth Dubben, who shuttered her popular indie art spot the Amrose Sable Gallery at the end of May. And it didn’t take her very long.

Dubben’s entrancing new one-person exhibition, “In the Middle of the World,” opened on Friday, June 5 at the Albany Art Room, where it will remain on view through Sunday, June 28.

Elizabeth Dubben: Continuation (2009)

Her evocative works are small but rich and oh so rewarding, a perfect match for the Art Room’s tiny but exquisite back-room gallery. The show – hung by Dubben and Albany Art Room intern Kayla Berenger – makes the most of the intimate space.

Mixed media works that combine oil painting with image transfers of photographs that she’s taken, Dubben’s art aptly reflects the work that she selected as curator of the 31st annual Photo Regional at the Opalka Gallery earlier this year – ambitious art that employs photography as a key component but reaches well beyond the realm of photography.

Elizabeth Dubben

It’s an artistic approach that works well here. Dubben’s works are multi-layered with an inviting, lived-in feeling, delightfully enhanced by the bare, untreated wooden frames that wrap her images in a natural warmth and surprising depth.

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